Built Environment

Our research in the subject area of Built Environment is focused on the relationship between the history of the built environment, heritage development, evaluation, and professional practice. One central theme is how cultural objects are construed as historically valuable and how they are perceived as components of cultural heritage.
Our research includes discourse analysis, semiotics, source critique, and professional history perspectives. The difference between various groups’ relationships to their surroundings makes for an important theme, one in which we deal with cultural heritage processes in collaboration with ethnologists and urban planning researchers. It also addresses the relationship between the temporal and the enduring, between change and preservation.
It also includes the perspectives of the natural sciences on cultural heritage processes such as climate and landscape issues, and many of the issues addressed by the Built Environment group overlap with our research in the Craftsmanship and Conservation of Cultural Heritage Objects subject areas.
The Built Environment group’s major research themes and projects:

Structural Change and Cultural Heritage Processes

This area of research aims to expand our knowledge of the complex connections between structural change in society and cultural heritage processes. Among other things, our research intends to contribute to the development of methods for predicting change and communicating cultural heritage perspectives in various planning processes.
In 2009 we did a study of the interplay between conceptions of the future and different attitudes to the past in various planning situations in Gällivare-Malmberget. This study, financed by the Swedish National Heritage Board, was meant to illuminate how conceptions of the future and of the historical past can differ between planning authorities, advocates for the conservation of cultural heritage, and the general public. It also shed light on the importance of the physical environment for different groups as they undergo structural transformation and other profound social changes. Professor Ola Wetterberg was the study’s project leader; other contributors included Ingrid Martins Holmberg, PhD, Associate Professor Gabriella Olshammar, and Martin Gren, PhD.
Associate Professor Emeritus Nanne Engelbrektsson is studying changing attitudes toward cultural heritage.
Doctoral candidate Ylva Blank’s thesis project is dealing with issues of how the mass-produced housing projects of the 1960s and 70s become part of our cultural heritage.
Another doctoral student, Sören Holmström, is doing a thesis on professional documentation as an operative support in the conservation process.
Bosse Lagerqvist, PhD, has specialized in what should be done with former industrial environments.

The History of the Built Environment and Buildings

An important part of the department’s research deals with the history of the built environment and various aspects of building history. Our research on the history of the built environment studies transformation processes in the cultural landscape, the rural building stock, and the urban environment. Building history research deals with questions of how buildings have been planned, constructed, and used in different eras. The objective is to increase our understanding of individual buildings and historical periods and to develop methods of studying buildings. In these methodological studies, our building history research overlaps a great deal with the issues confronted by craftsmanship research.
This area of research involves several department faculty members and doctoral students: Associate Professor Ulrich Lange, doctoral student Gunnar Almevik, Associate Professors Kina Linscott and Charlotta Hanner Nordstrand, PhD, and Ewa Sandström Malinowski, PhD.

The Urban Climate

Professor Ingegärd Eliasson leads a research group in the field of urban climatology (the Urban Climate Group). In recent decades, the group has undertaken research projects that focus on the climate of the city in relation to its infrastructure, land use, air quality, and climate comfort, as well as its relationship to climate change and tourism. They work with both basic research and interdisciplinary projects in which the implementation of climate knowledge in urban planning is a central area of interest. The Urban Climate Group is doing field studies in cities in Sweden, Japan, England, Botswana, Tanzania, Burkina Faso, and Kenya.

Space, Movement, and Artefacts in the Urban Landscape

Professor Hans Bjur is working together with the Swedish Institute in Rome and doctoral student Jonathan Westin on a project called Space, Movement, and Artefacts in the Urban Landscape. The project is a sophisticated attempt to develop a new area of knowledge within the field of conservation called Landscape Archeology. The most general question addressed is how cities can integrate historical layers into their development. The scientific objective is to critically examine and synthesize primarily existing studies (from archeology, urban studies, and other fields) of human movement and artifacts in the urban space. The goal is to open new perspectives on the city’s historical resources and patterns—on their meaning, integration, and design. One specific objective is that the results will lead to the identification of the central issues of the new interdisciplinary scientific field of landscape archeology. Another objective is that the new field and its research will be of direct pragmatic utility in the ongoing processes of urban development.